Byun Baekhyun believed that he had faltered faith in miracles, let alone the thought of it occurring to him pass.

With flaming rage, he hated it with utmost conspicuousness, not failing to voice out his opinions almost solemnly when someone actually mentions that miracles do exist. Behind calm tone lies a masked storm, rarely breaks out and more often than not, the façade of his built-up composed-self reigns over. He was known to be the most patient person after all.

The struggles he had when he was growing up was relatively obstinate in affecting him as a growing healthy young teen. Loud, bellowing voices always reaches behind his closed bed room doors and little Baekhyun could do nothing but hide underneath thick duvets to black out the chaos. It does close to little but he still does it every night, as it progress, additional crashes of plates and skin slapping skin reverberates quite vividly amidst the thick silence.

Little did the small Baekhyun knew what was occurring in their household was not normal. Not until the parent’s recognition day event occurred in their school. The young him dully remembered all parents lovingly doted and fussed over their children, and he also dully remembered that he had been showcased for a little singing show. A recognition for his parents was demanded but he could only answer with a frail shaking of head, answering his teacher straight in the eye that no one could come for him, even a guardian.

He also dully remembers how the teacher shot him a glance of pity and starting then, he also hated it when people looked at him like he was a hopeless case.

The little him was awfully silent, tight-lipped and composed. He also dully remembered that he asked a fellow classmate of his, if his parents actually fought with plates crashing and slight domestic abuse that he could not understand. Up until that point he thought that what he had was normal yet when his classmate answered that it never occurred to them, that his mom and dad would always actually do the greasy stuff like kissing in front of him.

Only then did little Baekhyun realized that after all this time, he had been an odd one out. Bringing back the numb memories from Parent’s day event added to his little frustration, that it was only his parents could not even attend and for whatever cause it was, he never knew.

That was the start of his doubt and as he grew, he came to understand that he never actually saw his parents dine together. Sure, he had a fair share of friends to spare him from the utmost grief of not having the comfort of a “happy” family, but when the violence of his father extended out to him, it was also in the least expected things to be normal. Trying to be a little more optimistic, Baekhyun etched in his mind that whatever was happening in his life, others might have it worse.

Jealousy proved to be a real though, that every time he comes over to a friend’s house and see how his friend would be close to their parents, Baekhyun could not help but feel pity for himself. Pity for how he actually was jealous and eyes his friends’ family with heaps of envy.

He hated himself for pitying himself. He was an adolescent and he was envious for a happy family. Byun Baekhyun despised himself a lot and maybe the heavens also does.

That night that he came home past curfew and expectedly he was greeted by punches on gut, and everywhere his father’s fist could reach. Underneath his disheveled clothes lies an endless amount of bruises, some purple-ish and other scars freshly bleeding due to opened wounds. No matter how much cries or pleas he shouted, as pitiful as he looked there he could not care as much.

His pale and dry cracked lips opened to cry desperately for help, for a miracle.

But it does not arrive, nor does it knock once in his life.

Especially when he needed it most, the opportunity to actually know what a miracle feels like never arrived.

Up until this day, there were two things Baekhyun believed he loathed. With every fiber of his being, miracles and pity were words that he had long kicked out of his dictionary.

That night, Baekhyun decided he had enough and left his home. No one in that house even cared for him, not in the slightest did he feel some love and attention poured out to him.

How’d he survived that for seventeen lonely years, he does not even know himself.

“I’m home.” His composed voice echoed amidst the silence, door creaking as he opened it. No one greets him back and it was to be expected. Ten years had passed by in a flash and a lot of things had occurred unexpectedly.

Two years into Baekhyun’s independence, and the word of his father dying did not make him flinch. It came to him like calm waves along the shore, his feet digging into glass shards of memories instead of smooth sand grains.

Of course, Baekhyun attended both memorial and burial but as expected, no one even came. Even his own wife that he failed to love.  It was his own son who half-heartedly arranged everything, ordering a simple bouquet of flowers for the memorial service. That was the least he could do to serve his deceased father but it was not like he owed him anything. Maybe he does, for letting him still grow up with the littlest sanity left, but can he still count that up? More so when he grew up in a house of pain and agony instead of love and affection.

Baekhyun threw away his pride. His father was dead anyway but was it his fault that he’d hear the old man laughing drunkenly at him even at this situation?

Burial was held at some place he did not know and ever since then, he did not visit the grave of someone who he could hardly call his father. 

Fast forward once more and it was almost when Baekhyun starts forgetting everything else about his past, it came to haunt him again. Yet this time, in the form of letter. The sender was anonymous but it clearly stated about the topic of his mother getting sick. Eight years into his independence and suddenly another news that came to haunt him and at this point, miracles are just beyond his comprehension.

Somehow he still wondered if the heavens had this hatred reserved just for him.

Almost nine years when he had the guts to visit his dying mother, only to find out that she had someone to take care of her. Outside the hospital door, through the glass, he watched someone move inside the room with much ease and comfort, it makes Baekhyun feel the slightest envy that he could not even reach out to his mother like that person does.

Hesitation came, doubts came and flew but he knocked with ease and a clenched fist at his side. He does not know if could face his mother with straight face. The question comes to him again. Does he owe his mother anything? For raising him up maybe, but she never even tried and almost Baekhyun had done everything on his own when he was a child and up until now, there was not much difference.

The financial support for Baekhyun’s seventeen years of living was not enough favor to feel like he owed them anything. After all, what he wanted was more than material possessions and luxury living.

Come in, he remembers vaguely how rough and raspy the voice came. It was throaty and dry, the cause of everything due to her mother’s illness. With light steps he came inside the room, gathering a small attention of two persons inside. One, his mother looking deathly pale at her bed and a man’s orbs staring at him from head to toe. Baekhyun’s mother did not look too surprised, but the very moment they made eye contact, her worn out eyes cried tears.

All things a mother could ever say came pouring out her mother’s cracked and pale lips. With heartless eyes, Baekhyun kept his face straight and he could not even try pretend in the slightest that he was moved. He vividly remember that moment, the exact words he said that made his mother cry herself to her deathbed, life full of agony and most probably, regrets.

“Why are you saying these things now when I least … Oh, I probably don’t need it anymore.”

It was heartless, numb and the cold way he treated his mother was the only thing he could do to act the way he never could before. Rebellious years that he never experienced nor the long scolding that his friends get when they break one house rule. He was not able to be the selfish, immature child that every children goes into a phase of.  That one big thing he was robbed of and he could not do anything to take it all back. Selfishly speaking, Baekhyun simply wanted to get it back to his parents and does he even feel sympathy for them anymore? Honestly and obviously not.   

After he left, not another word out of his lips, he pondered about why he even went there in the first place. Then again, he still could not deny that a small part of himself still wanted to hear what a child have always longed to hear, to feel and to have.

As he was left alone to walk in the pouring rain, tears drenched his face together with fat raindrops. Until this very part, melancholy was a friend of his.

Baekhyun tried to walk cautiously around the creaking floor boards, the moldy smell of the wooden flooring somewhat a little too pungent especially on a cloudy afternoon. This very hall had his memories rushing to him, and the wallpapers of the dark foyer was empty of any pictures of his family.

He laughed humorlessly to himself.

“Even this house was not loved by its owners.” he said, grabbing a door knob and making his way to his old bedroom. The attic. The door’s hinges were already rusty and creaking from the long duration of being unused, the old room’s ceilings covered in cobwebs and dusts.

Clearly, his parents did not take effort to even cover the furnishings of his room and saw how his bed is rotting with dirt and stains. With a simple night stand at its bedside which is also covered in thick layers of dust, the lantern atop, he concludes, could barely work.  Basically, everything in his room was neglected and it is not something new to him anymore but even years after the dull pain has subsided, Baekhyun guessed he was still not yet numbed to the brim.

Pacing a little slowly inside his room gives him nothing but dull memories of him crying beneath thick blankets and covers. After school hours, the little Baekhyun would rush to his bedroom, and remains the door locked all throughout midnight. By the clock strikes twelve or one in the midnight, little Baekhyun would slowly pad his way to the kitchen and prepare his own soup or if not, a ramen every once in a while.

Baekhyun’s present self sees his past shadows moving on and about inside the bedroom, sometimes stuck in the corner with legs tucked underneath pale, slender arms as he rocked back and forth. Those moments were the times he desperately tried to drown out his parents’ voices.

Approaching his cabinet, he faintly remember another memory where he was so envious of his friends that had their own cabinet for toys. Now that he was an adult, he finds it a petty thing but really, the inner child in him screams differently. Dragging out a drawer and peering inside, he finds a glass ball amidst the empty space. Underneath the sphere was a perfectly washed cloth, all white and its silkiness evident from the dim lighting his room provides.

Byun was perfectly sure he never owned such a thing and with delicate actions, he grasped for the ball and let it rest atop his palms, eyes scrutinizing the finest details of the glass sphere.

It was almost magical, how the sphere had blue and white gossamer threads floating about inside the glass globe. Enchanting, was a word to closely define it and Baekhyun makes out a faint dark ethereal ink marking on the globe’s surface. In perfect handwriting, it scribbles Park Chanyeol.

“Park Chanyeol…” Baekhyun mumbled, examining the sphere a little closer atop his palms. The way the words slipped so perfectly on his tongue made something inside him feel inexplicably… delightful. A sort of anxiousness mixed with anticipation, but about what, Baekhyun queries it himself. His eyes sparkled with interest, but the moment it slipped him out from the reverie, he was rushing to get it back atop the perfectly ironed silk cloth.

Only to slip out of his grasp and the glass sphere fell to the ground with a loud crash.

Belatedly, a cloud of smoke puffed from the shattered globe, not giving Baekhyun time to think thoroughly about what was happening. Maybe it was a fire set to go off when the globe shattered, but the clear smoke said otherwise, yet the smell of it made Baekhyun cough indignantly, eyes tearing up from the excessive coughing. 

After a few seconds of thick silence, Baekhyun pried his eyes open only to see the room without the puff of smoke.

Instead he found someone stepping on the shattered glass, a man in his twenties and not far older the Baekhyun himself. More importantly, how did this stranger found his way inside Baekhyun’s house without hearing the old floor boards creak? Hell, the doors rusting hinges were enough of an alarm to give away if someone’s opening the doors.

Yet he heard none of those and eyed the beautiful stranger in front of him.

He was six feet or so, those endearingly sticking out ears beneath matted silver hair were simply cute of a sight to see. His almond eyes were piercing and also big, orbs full of wonder and Baekhyun could clearly see that the man was in a state of query himself.  Everything about him was just big, ridiculously large or sticking out but Baekhyun finds himself attracted.

Weirdly appealed to someone he just met for the first time.

What he finds in this tall stranger, maybe it was that this man was everything Baekhyun wished to be and it was weird how he could thoughtlessly think of such. He was a stranger after all.  

The silence was thick, atmosphere a little tensioned or maybe it was just Baekhyun but he should stop being so fascinated when someone he does not really know suddenly appears in front of him. The stranger itself had his sight wandering around the room and it fails to land on Baekhyun’s curious orbs.

“Excuse me, but who are you and what are you doing here?” Baekhyun calmly asked, his calm composure strikingly perplexing for the stranger. With a brow raised, the smaller now finds himself watching the taller. Those huge forest orbs bursting with curiosity and its sight roamed the room with much intrigued feeling.

The moment Baekhyun spoke was when the magical silence was broken, and the stranger’s lively eyes landed on his.

Without another word, Baekhyun’s heart thumped loudly and he was appallingly perplexed when the stranger silently spilled tears. Bare feet trudged across the scattered glass and left a trail of blood on the moldy floor boards, as if the pain does not exist to his senses and he continued to close the gap between Baekhyun and him.

Arms gradually stretched out as he neared, the petite man finds himself engulfed in an embrace.  The stranger’s hands find itself comfortably resting at the small of Baekhyun’s back, the other entangling itself on his soft brunette locks and Baekhyun could feel himself emptied out of breath, the oxygen knocked out of him. Hot breath hit his neck and ear, the stranger’s face was strangely comfortably resting by the crook of his neck but what was weird that Baekhyun did not find himself pushing him away.

He felt the hammering of his heart against the taller’s chest, the latter indescribably feeling the same things as Baekhyun felt the silver-haired man’s heart thud fast.

What the stranger said next, Baekhyun finds himself having messed and scattered thoughts.

“You have done enough, Baekhyun-ah. It’s okay now.”

Strangely, his eyes felt funny and the next moment the constrained tears spilt non-stop.

Home is a word Baekhyun had been unfamiliar with throughout his twenty-seven years of living. Yet that very instance, he thought, maybe that was how home really felt like.

    “Who are you, really?” Baekhyun queried, head throbbing and his face clear of tear stains but his puffy eyes gives away that he had cried for some time. Hands intertwined and placed atop the dusty kitchen counter, Baekhyun could only stare at the taller in fascination, not to mention, his rationality says something is weirdly not right here. His brows scrunched in scrutiny and it almost hurt but the sudden smile on the stranger’s feature caught him off-guard.

“I’m the miracle you wished for ten years ago. Park Chanyeol, if you did not see on the sphere.”

“Are you out of your mind?” he asked incredulously, scoffing. “First, mircales aren’t real and second –“

“ ‘Please, give me a miracle. Someone just save me from this pain.’ Is what you cried out that night, did you not?”Chanyeol, the tall silver-haired man interrupted, eyes suddenly a piercing gaze that made Baekhyun shut up. “After that hopelessness you felt, you left the house. This very house that you grew up in for seventeen years. This very… home that was treasured by no one.” Chanyeol continued to narrate, eyes now wandering around the chipping tapestry and old broken clock. Something in his eyes portrayed vivid feelings of solemnity, grief and the deep anguish that Baekhyun was once able to detect in his reflection before.

His heart clenched, not because it was felt by Chanyeol towards him but rather seeing those emotions stir someone else’s heart was tragic. Baekhyun could only imagine how his past self would have looked like with all the pain easily read unto his eyes, sorrow clearly painted on his face but it was not like his present self was of any difference. He simply learned to conceal it tightly from the rest of the world.

“What was left of your will to survive, I was formed. Those pieces of little tears that you shed every day, after you left this house and even until today, I hear them all. With the very last strand of your faith in miracles was cut, miracle itself was formed. That was I, lying dormant for ten years and waiting for your return.”

“How…” Baekhyun quietly trailed, finding his once composed-self lacking rationality and presence of mind slowly fading into messy thoughts. With lost wandering emotions, without his uptight self, who was Baekhyun exactly. He strongly detested how miracles could come true, nor its very existence of word but one person comes and tell him that he was a miracle formed from his dire desperation and Baekhyun finds himself lost.

“You are swayed aren’t you?” Chanyeol queried, tone dead but the faintest sorrow pinched his words. With gradual steps, the taller approached Baekhyun from the side and knelt to face him, eye to eye.

“It was because somewhere deep inside you,” Chanyeol softly speaks now, eyes softening and his velvet voice making Baekhyun believe just everything he says. Big calloused hand slowly lays atop Baekhyun’s chest, just where his heartbeat could be found. When he looked at Chanyeol’s eyes again, he felt like crying all over. “…you still hoped that there would come a time, someone will come and tell you ‘everything’s going to be fine. A miracle will come.’. That someone will come and help you heal from all the suffering.”

“How do you know me so well… I don’t even know you.” Baekhyun silently murmured, tears now streaming silently again down his face. Chanyeol slowly stood on his feet and enveloped Baekhyun in an embrace, an intimate action that Baekhyun missed out on feeling, soaking himself with the warmth of affection that he was never poured out on before.

Arms were encircled around his petite frame and someone was actually here, for once, to comfort him of his cries. This time around, someone blocked out the fiery voices raging inside his head and calmed him to stillness. Mere blankets and duvets from his memories are slowly replaced with Chanyeol’s sweet murmurs of nothing and everything warm like his long embraces.

It was this time around, he had not felt pity for himself nor someone to feel a damn pity for him.

“So… this is how to be loved feels like.” Baekhyun murmured, bringing up his arms to Chanyeol’s torso and hugging him closer, burying his face a little deeper into the taller’s white tee. “or maybe I am just a little too desperate.” He chuckled bitterly to himself, tightening his grasp on Chanyeol’s shirt.

“I’ve been delayed for ten years. Do you think of yourself still desperate?”

A nod and Chanyeol smiled at that.

“Don’t be. You might have run away last time, but I’m definitely not just sitting this time around.”

Baekhyun still doubts, but maybe, just maybe… this time around, love and home will find its way to him.

And he will try to believe again, in miracles that he once thought he had lost faith in.

I had a hard time writing this literary piece. I wrote it for two days straight without sleep and it might seem like rushed with only three thousand plus words, but believe me. I've spent sleepless nights planning this one out and mapping out the flow of events. It might seem like a measly thing for some but, personally I loved this one most out of all my writing. I hope this story will be well appreciated and loved. 

BaekYeol's love wins. 

XOXO DjCMG <3 <3